A glorious synthesis and extension of your ideas. I devoured this article. The implications are where this really gets the heart racing. This feels like the foundation for a resynthesis of science and religion, just what humanity needs to burst into a new post-reductionist era.
Thank you Shane. Yes, I think this approach can potentially end much of the conflict between science and religion. A highly evolved universe, travelling along a developmental path that is fine-tuned to produce intelligent life, is explicable in terms of science, while fulfilling many of the functions of a religious belief system. I keep returning to that old quote of Teilhard de Chardin, "The universe is God coming into being."
Geoff, you are clearly riding on the breaking crest of the shockwave of what is likely to eventually be recognized as the most profound revolution in science to now. I, too, am a rider on the boundaries of several sciences, natural philosophy, and epistemology. Due to the extraordinary circumstances of my early life, I was already a polymath by the time I finished elementary school - where more than 90% of my learning was extracurricular. Even when finishing secondary education in San Diego's top university prep school as a science major covering a pre-engineering curriculum, at least 70% of my learning would have been extracurricular - more than enough for me to be riding several shockwave crests. In my professional careers, these shockwaves led me into 2 years of postdoc study of the history and epistemology of science, especially revolutionary paradigm busting, amongst numerous other diversions into other bodies of knowledge.
I have a deep understanding of many of the problems you are facing, and I have most of the disciplinary and epistemological tools you are asking for above. The only one where I would be a dead loss is with funding. I'm retired, living on Australia's aged pension and a small amount of US Social Security (at least until Trump decides expats are traitors...).
Some Background
My combination of learnings is so unique that I think some background is required to understand how the multidisciplinary skill set I claim is even possible to be found and still to be functional in a single person - even though it was acquired over an 85-year life span.
I was raised by two scientifically trained parents (my Mother has a BS in Chemistry, and my Father has a BS in Geology and worked as a salesman, boatsman, industrial engineer, boat-builder, commercial fisherman, and integrated logistic support engineer). We lived full-time on a 1929 "gentleman's motor yacht" that Dad served on part-time in the Coast Guard Auxiliary when it was drafted as a harbor patrol boat in WWII, grabbed and refurbished when it was demobilized as war surplus in 1945. On workdays and school days, our home was moored in LA/Long Beach Harbor in the midst of active oilfields and then San Diego Harbor, home of the US Pacific Fleet ships and the Navy's West Coast aircraft repair and maintenance facility, along with a plethora of high-tech industries, research institutes, museums, etc. -- including aquaria, astronautics, natural history, nuclear power, marine biology/oceanography, zoos, etc. When we weren't required to be in port, our yacht spent a lot of time anchored in several of the many coves around Catalina Island, where I spent hours of the day snorkeling around the extensive kelp forests and rocky shorelines.
Carl Sagan explored the Universe in his "Ship of the Imagination -- [for observing, thinking, speculating and testing] – perfect as a snowflake, organic as a dandelion seed, it will carry us to worlds dreamed, and worlds of fact". My ship of the imagination was real: stout cedar hull & varnished mahogany superstructure that physically carried me to many different living worlds that I could touch, smell, feel and interact with, and worlds of theoretical, technical, and biological knowledge.
Some of my relevant areas of expertise and knowledge (order of initiation). Once started, my interests and learning in each of these bodies of knowledge continued through my life up to today.
• physical geology and paleontology (from 1945 - father's 1930's textbooks & local oil-fields and pristine landscapes of offshore islands + added resources in physical oceanography and geophysical research facilities accessible from secondary schools in San Diego).
• marine biology, ecology, and systematics across beaches, rocky shores, eutrophic estuaries & harbors with muddy bottoms, piers & floats, sea-grass meadows; open ocean; kelp forests, rocky shores with coraline algae, various red and brown algeas, sea grasses in rock and sand-bottomed coves on offshore bottoms, etc. (from 1945 - accessed via the family's yacht. The combination of Earth sciences with the breadth of marine biology, led to strong early interests in evolution).
• physics & engineering with a focus on nuclear physics and engineering, astronomy, & cosmology (from 1945 - following atom bombing of Japan - facilitated by access to good libraries, Griffith Observatory -- mid '40s and early '50s, and in high school and university access to 100" Mt Wilson Telescope and San Diego's aerospace research, development & manufacturing institutes & astronomical facilities. The addition of physics and cosmology to Earth sciences and evolutionary biology clearly extended to considering the nature of time and the evolutionary universe).
• Microscopy, microbiology, optics, and microanatomy (from around 1948 when a retired photographer living on a neighboring yacht gave me a set of professional objective lenses that fit the screw threads on a toy microscope I had. I soon kludged the rest of the mechanics and optics required to give me a university quality microscope that allowed me to explore the diversity of microscopic life from which most of the animal and plant phyla - and their embryos - evolved. Teaching invertebrate biology at Southern Illinois University Edwardsville provided me with access to a high-powered, long-focus medical microscope, which afforded ample opportunities to study the unfettered activities of various phyla of microbiota through the side of marine and freshwater aquaria.)
• marine and aerospace engineering and production (from 1945 - when my father began restoring our family yacht and rebuilding two surplus landings into highly capable albacore trollers amongst the WWII shipyards, and later worked as a boat handler for Howard Hughes's "Spruce Goose", for several decades the largest heavier than air craft ever flown. From around 1962, when we moved to San Diego, he worked as an industrial and logistic support engineer for Ryan Aeronautical and then overhaul & repair of the Pacific Naval Air Arm at North Island Air Station just across the channel from where we were moored. And then San Diego was also the home of General Dynamics' development and production of Atlas rockets that launched the Moon landers.)
Beginning with my tertiary education in 1957, my areas of expertise began expanding exponentially. These will only be listed - again, more or less in the order they were acquired.
• All generations of computer technologies: cybernetics, analysis, design, flow charting, and programming.
• General biology & natural history: origin of life & exobiology, population biology, biogeography, niche construction, and systematics & classification.
• Radiation and systems ecology: engineering & remote sensing analyses of nuclear accidents (e.g., Fukushima Daiichi, Chernobyl, 3-Mile Island, etc.), biological and civilian impacts of environmental radiation, radiological tracing, isotopic dating, trophic ecology, and food webs.
• Other ecology: e.g., wildfire origins & succession.
• Biochemistry and structural biology: molecular biology, cell biology & ultrastructure, histology, and functional & comparative anatomy.
• Earth sciences: plate tektonics, geomorphology, stratigraphy, climatology, glaciology, physical oceanography, hydrology, natural sources of greenhouse gases and their feedback contributions to global warming.
• Historical studies: history of philosophy of science and technology, nature and structure of scientific revolutions after Thomas Kuhn, nature of wars (focus on WWII), biography of leadership, social change, economic structure, comparative religion, archeology, hominin evolution, emergence of language and self-consciousness, coevolution of cognition and technologies.
• Theory of heirarchically complex living systems: emergence of autopoiesis at several levels of organization, organizational epistemology, OODA cycles, and management of organizational knowledge.
• Complexity, assembly theory, chaos, complex systems analysis. Engineering: Failure modes effects and criticality analysis (FMECA), logistics support engineering and analysis, integrated project lifecycle data & documentation management, engineering change management, etc. Biology: emergence, phylogenesis, thresholds, collapse, extinction. Evolutionary cosmology.
• Philosophy & epistemology: evolutionary epistemology, normal science, truth, verification, falsification, fallibility, objective vs subjective knowledge, Kuhn's paradigms & scientific revolutions, radical constructivism, reductionism, comparative approach, fake news & alternative facts, prediction, anticipation, forecasting, modeling, Popper's three worlds of knowledge, teleology & teleonomy, Aristotle's four causes, Ockham's razor, philosophy of mind.
As soon as I have the time, I will share some of my relevant writings and make several suggestions as to where your theory can be strengthened and extended. There is very little I would disagree with in terms of your theoretical proposals or interpretation of evidence.
William Hall, PhD
Retired: evolutionary biologist / epistemologist / complex systems analyst & designer / earth systems scientist
Stellar work! You've not only made a daring rush at the truth, unsupported by conventional credentials, but given us all a great deal of fun in the process. You might be right, too, of course, and justly win universal praise.
As you continue to explore the rich theme of the Eggiverse, give a thought to the possibility that the universe has been (super-)naturally selected to reproduce with the help of human agency. Reëcreational Theology embraces that hypothesis and from it makes an argument for having s*x (like biological sex but moreso) with the universe; see: https://t0morrow.substack.com/
Congratulations; you're well on your way to sainthood in the first real science of theology.
Thank you, I think! If evolutionary cosmology gains traction, I do think there will be an extraordinarily fertile conversation between science and religion. The boundaries will get very blurred. (And I suspect there will be a great deal of resistance to that, from both the science and religion sides.)
The idea of early black hole formation driving later star and galaxy formation a great idea, but I can't think of any reason you need to bring in evolution. If you haul in evolution, you have to come up with a mechanism that preserves some of the laws of physics across the creation of a new one while allowing others to vary. Darwin could at least start out with the empirical fact of heredity. New organisms largely resemble their parent organisms. We have nothing like this with regard to universe formation.
This is especially problematic since the whole evolutionary idea is unnecessary. Why not just invoke the anthropic principle? Here we are debating this. That's an empirical fact. Why haul in so much extraneous complexity. Why deal with annoyed evolutionary biologists who have their own philosophical concerns? There's an awful lot of teleology here. We don't know how new universes are formed, and almost by definition we can't know much about them.
It makes much more sense to develop a theory that explains our universe without bonus mysticism, and it looks like you have a good one here. I don't see how it benefits from introducing failed universes and the possibility of super-universes and the like. It offers a good framework for addressing the early galaxy problem, the voids and filaments problem and, for all I know, the rotation curve problem.
P.S. In N-body research, there's a common pattern of increasingly tightly coupled subsystems with their angular momentum dissipated by overall system expansion. This fits very well with that. Complexity develops from the basic mathematics of gravitational attraction in an expanding universe. I took most of The Janus Point with a grain of salt, but I suspect the discussion of the N-body problem is at least aligned.
I really like the cosmological part, seems like a neat solution to many important problems. Nice work!
But I am not convinced at all by the evolutionary part:
1. I don't think it can be tested unless we can observe our child-universes or parent-universe, which we cannot, by definition.
2. To have evolution we need reproduction, which we have here, but also some competition for resources. Do universes compete for something among themselves? In an evolutionary theory I would like to see a conclusion that in the long run there are no universes not optimized for survival. Without that we can only say that our universe is more probable than a universe which cannot harbor us, but that's not super interesting.
3. It is unecessary to make cosmological part work. I suppose they fit nicely together, but if cosmological part explains observations and gives correct predictions it does so regardless of a reason for our universe's starting conditions.
"1. I don't think it can be tested unless we can observe our child-universes or parent-universe, which we cannot, by definition."
I am a hobbyist at best and I'm sure I haven't grasped everything fully, so please indulge me. I agree with your statement, yet perhaps we could see galaxies from relatives-universes.
Could galaxies from neighboring universes expand toward us, be observable and perhaps even collide with a galaxy of ours? Could the origin of such galaxies be detected as different?
Without presuming another dimension, I'd guess that the multiverse resembles a clump of multiplying cells butting up against each other.
2. That’s what I was thinking. If the reproductive cost is zero, per the article, and given that time is an in-universe constraint rather than existing outside of it, then there is no selection for or against different levels of black hole optimization. They should all produce equal amounts over ‘time’, if my logic is on track here.
Moreover, if our own universe is the spawn of a black hole that presumably was produced by a technological civilization to use for energy, wouldn’t we see the effects somewhere of extra mass from outside the universe being fed into ours to use for energy on their side?
And as someone else pointed out above, if black holes can disappear over time from emitting hawking radiation, what are the in-universe implications for this?
At any rate, this article is very interesting and I love his critiques of the mainstream theory and reasons behind it. Personally, I think that reality tends to be more interesting than whatever story we come up with to draw meaning from it, which is why his theory seems (to me anyway) to lose momentum when he gets into the cosmological and more speculative section.
Cool theory, love it. Unlikely as it appears, it would be really funny if a major branch of physics ended up disrupted by a complete outsider's theory formulated in qualitative (non-math) language.
I remember reading that S. Hawking more or less proved that black holes radiate energy, so that smaller ones can end up vanishing entirely. How does that fit with your theory, or Smolin's? If the creation of a black hole also creates a universe, what happens to that universe when the black hole vanishes?
I might be missing the mechanisms of heredity within this evolutionary paradigm. If a universe's 'fitness' is simply determined by the propensity for black holes to form within it, i.e:
1. Black holes spawn universes
2. Universes well-suited for black holes production greatly outnumber those where black holes are scarce
3. Technological societies provide an immense evolutionary advantage in this context, as technological progress converges towards the creation of artificial black holes (which greatly outnumber naturally-formed ones)
how then would universes inherit from the context of their spawning black hole? What might be the analogue to recombination or mosaicism yielding subtle incremental differences subject to selective pressure?
Excellent stuff Julian! It’s exciting to see all your thoughts and insights so fully laid out. And good riddance to dark matter :)
I do think this is the foundational truth of our type of universe. I think for anyone for whom the Nick Bostrum argument strikes a chord (in the supposition that if a certain type of universe mathematically dominates/outnumbers another, that’s the one we are likely to experience), that cosmological natural selection should be orders of magnitude more impactful and more innate.
I’m extremely impressed with the blowtorch concept and the testable predictions you make (something that seems to be too foreboding to those squarely in academia doing research), and I’m excited to see them bear out.
The two things I’d personally think about/would love to hear your arguments about:
1. why black hole drives/reactors over matter-antimatter annihilation drives (I guess: is it truly theoretically maximally efficient to use black holes over whatever loss would be evolved in the precursor or capture steps to matter-antimatter annihilation). Is there something there about the lack of antimatter in the early universe that the theory also illuminates? Perhaps that antimatter was never created, or just the more obvious statement that such a universe with lots of initial annihilation would not have reproduced/made black holes well so we don’t find ourselves in one. [Perhaps this should be an additional postulate you volunteer: matter-anti-matter annihilation as a power generator will never be as efficient as black holes well drives.?]
2. We spoke about this at some point, but how does the local vs global maxima come into play from a cardinality/degree of infinity and reproduction standpoint.
Also from a SETI mindset, are there any technosignatures of Everest size black hole drives we could hope to see? I understand you are trying to straddle the line between mainstream (ie non “woo woo”) enough to be considered by “serious” scientific minds, but an obvious unstated (or maybe merely hinted at) part of the 3rd wave of black holes is ubiquitous intelligence. Maybe that can be saved for when you’ve hit the mainstream :)
Amazing stuff and I will be sure to share! I think Event Horizon with John Michael Godier would be an excellent place to be interviewed. Event horizons: https://youtube.com/@eventhorizonshow?si=X6Ow0eI7HX3UIkjA and his more short form channel: https://youtube.com/@johnmichaelgodier?si=3NR108ux0EMLtEGX are both very fascinating and he’s very open to new theories. His shorter form channel had a video uploaded yesterday regarding the evidence that our universe is inside a spinning black hole that is relevant, and he gets on serious people for event horizon. You’d make an excellent guest and he has had numerous videos touching on cosmological natural selection. I will comment on his latest video regarding this post and bringing you on.
Amazing stuff and can’t wait to keep following this. Here’s to hoping this borders on consensus in the next 15 years!
First, this is fantastic. I found Smolin's book three years ago, when Covid gave me time and motivation to think about why the universe exists. The concept forms its own gravitational well that sucks in those of us who share the instinct that dark matter is not delivering on its initial promise. I am grateful you are doing this project, and building a community of people crazy enough to take it seriously.
I want to get feedback on a related theory that shepherds the universe to the exact same fine-tuned constants as your and Smolin's evolution, but without going through trial and error phase. I would really like your reaction. (Yes, the theory is mine, and yes I also have no formal background to support the notion that I can generate a useful theory here. So it goes. I've been sitting on this for a while, without a community to test it on, so again, huge thanks for having the courage to start publishing on line here.)
The endpoint is trillions of technologically-produced black holes. And the mechanism is that while you are positing we get there by sampling potential futures in series (one at a time, through evolution), I think we get to the same place by sampling potential futures in parallel.
Here is how.
Rather than arrive at the end state of intelligent life through cycles of trial and error (black hole birth and universe creation), we can instead posit the following: (a) the physical constants of the universe could be something else (other than what we see, which are weirdly fined tuned for life); (b) those constants are actually variables at sufficiently high energy, like at the moment of the Big Bang; (c) the constants physically freeze into place as the universe cools; (d) this freezing is really an annealing process; and (e) the path that leads to the most rapid cooling is the one that gets frozen in. That's it. If you assume that, you find yourself on a path to intelligent life.
Why? One weird property of life is that it accelerates the creation of entropy. Life is good at finding pockets of energy, consuming that energy to create more life, and releasing low grade heat as a byproduct. Intelligent life is theoretically even more efficient at this than run-of-the-mill life. As you point out, black hole formation is the ultimate way of converting energy to entropy. So a theory that says "black hole formation is reproductive" and one that says "black hole formation is maximally energy dissipating, and the universe will go down the path that cools most quickly" end up in exactly the same place at the end.
The reason I like this theory, even after reading yours and Smolin's, is that the mechanism for fine-tuning isn't reliant on a random walk. It does require one large, uncomfortable leap: the annealing process has to be impacted by events that occur far in the future, after those constants have been fixed (e.g., the constants forming at/near the Big Bang has to somehow be influence by the ability to form life billions of years later). Smolin's theory allows the universe to sampling possible states through a random walk. This idea instead posits an anneal process that samples possible future universe through what is probably a uncollapsed quantum state that encompasses future times. If you think about it long enough, the anneal process requires some degree of retrocausality, which not exactly a great place to be. But also we have really had trouble figuring out how time actually works in physics, there are versions of retrocausality in quantum theory that are not entirely nuts, and, well, at some point we know that some laws of physics need to be rethought for the universe to make sense. I vote for this one, but understand that's a matter of taste.
I think that everything else you predict would hold for an annealed system vs an evolved one. Again, the only difference is evolution samples future states in series, while the anneal samples in parallel.
I would love comment, feedback, and conversation. Thanks again.
I wanted to specifically compliment you on how well you are able to distill an extremely esoteric and complicated set of theoretical/observational data into a well argued, coherent essay supporting your ideas. IMO not enough people understand how truly rare it is for someone to 1) even have the capacity to understand the frontiers of something such as cosmology and 2) understand this well enough to communicate it to a lay audience through a medium which is graspable. I'm a genetic counselor, so my work is analogously to translate evolution/mendelian risks to everyday people in such as a way that they can make informed decisions about things that affect their lives and that of their offspring. If you think the services of someone such as me might eventually be of use to you, let's chat more, or perhaps downstream...
One specific question if you get around to a reply: If I understood you, directly observing the EM radation from these large filaments in relation to the direct-collapse SMBHs is difficult to do because so much time has passed that these orientations in space have morphed over gajillions of years to make those relationships hard to appreciate. I'm wondering if that is also true of the large filaments that should have the North/South orientation to the SMBHs. eg. is it possible to predict, observe, and confirm if at the ends of these large filaments there are appropriately positioned SMBHs, or is this too Laplace's Demon-y to say "the angular tilty-ness of the SMBHs aligns with the direction of their massive quasar output and is what created the filament architecture we see today"?
I suggest you look into black hole electrons, an old hypothesis that fell out of favor mostly because nobody could figure out how to test it, because I think you may be grossly underestimating the number of black holes involved.
Because it seems to me that the theory predicts something else: Every particle that can be made out of a black hole, will be made out of a black hole.
Aaaaargh! Yes, black hole electrons are an alarming possibility. Thanks for reminding me, I won't sleep tonight now...
No, I don't go there, because as you say, it seems untestable right now. And of course there are also the disturbing parallels between protons and black holes...
But again, I'm not qualified to wade into such deep water. I will stick to my modest task of explaining material reality at the macro scale in terms of evolution of universes...
A glorious synthesis and extension of your ideas. I devoured this article. The implications are where this really gets the heart racing. This feels like the foundation for a resynthesis of science and religion, just what humanity needs to burst into a new post-reductionist era.
Thank you Shane. Yes, I think this approach can potentially end much of the conflict between science and religion. A highly evolved universe, travelling along a developmental path that is fine-tuned to produce intelligent life, is explicable in terms of science, while fulfilling many of the functions of a religious belief system. I keep returning to that old quote of Teilhard de Chardin, "The universe is God coming into being."
Wanted, skilled plaster repair technician.
"Now What?" -- Indeed!
Geoff, you are clearly riding on the breaking crest of the shockwave of what is likely to eventually be recognized as the most profound revolution in science to now. I, too, am a rider on the boundaries of several sciences, natural philosophy, and epistemology. Due to the extraordinary circumstances of my early life, I was already a polymath by the time I finished elementary school - where more than 90% of my learning was extracurricular. Even when finishing secondary education in San Diego's top university prep school as a science major covering a pre-engineering curriculum, at least 70% of my learning would have been extracurricular - more than enough for me to be riding several shockwave crests. In my professional careers, these shockwaves led me into 2 years of postdoc study of the history and epistemology of science, especially revolutionary paradigm busting, amongst numerous other diversions into other bodies of knowledge.
I have a deep understanding of many of the problems you are facing, and I have most of the disciplinary and epistemological tools you are asking for above. The only one where I would be a dead loss is with funding. I'm retired, living on Australia's aged pension and a small amount of US Social Security (at least until Trump decides expats are traitors...).
Some Background
My combination of learnings is so unique that I think some background is required to understand how the multidisciplinary skill set I claim is even possible to be found and still to be functional in a single person - even though it was acquired over an 85-year life span.
I was raised by two scientifically trained parents (my Mother has a BS in Chemistry, and my Father has a BS in Geology and worked as a salesman, boatsman, industrial engineer, boat-builder, commercial fisherman, and integrated logistic support engineer). We lived full-time on a 1929 "gentleman's motor yacht" that Dad served on part-time in the Coast Guard Auxiliary when it was drafted as a harbor patrol boat in WWII, grabbed and refurbished when it was demobilized as war surplus in 1945. On workdays and school days, our home was moored in LA/Long Beach Harbor in the midst of active oilfields and then San Diego Harbor, home of the US Pacific Fleet ships and the Navy's West Coast aircraft repair and maintenance facility, along with a plethora of high-tech industries, research institutes, museums, etc. -- including aquaria, astronautics, natural history, nuclear power, marine biology/oceanography, zoos, etc. When we weren't required to be in port, our yacht spent a lot of time anchored in several of the many coves around Catalina Island, where I spent hours of the day snorkeling around the extensive kelp forests and rocky shorelines.
Carl Sagan explored the Universe in his "Ship of the Imagination -- [for observing, thinking, speculating and testing] – perfect as a snowflake, organic as a dandelion seed, it will carry us to worlds dreamed, and worlds of fact". My ship of the imagination was real: stout cedar hull & varnished mahogany superstructure that physically carried me to many different living worlds that I could touch, smell, feel and interact with, and worlds of theoretical, technical, and biological knowledge.
Some of my relevant areas of expertise and knowledge (order of initiation). Once started, my interests and learning in each of these bodies of knowledge continued through my life up to today.
• physical geology and paleontology (from 1945 - father's 1930's textbooks & local oil-fields and pristine landscapes of offshore islands + added resources in physical oceanography and geophysical research facilities accessible from secondary schools in San Diego).
• marine biology, ecology, and systematics across beaches, rocky shores, eutrophic estuaries & harbors with muddy bottoms, piers & floats, sea-grass meadows; open ocean; kelp forests, rocky shores with coraline algae, various red and brown algeas, sea grasses in rock and sand-bottomed coves on offshore bottoms, etc. (from 1945 - accessed via the family's yacht. The combination of Earth sciences with the breadth of marine biology, led to strong early interests in evolution).
• physics & engineering with a focus on nuclear physics and engineering, astronomy, & cosmology (from 1945 - following atom bombing of Japan - facilitated by access to good libraries, Griffith Observatory -- mid '40s and early '50s, and in high school and university access to 100" Mt Wilson Telescope and San Diego's aerospace research, development & manufacturing institutes & astronomical facilities. The addition of physics and cosmology to Earth sciences and evolutionary biology clearly extended to considering the nature of time and the evolutionary universe).
• Microscopy, microbiology, optics, and microanatomy (from around 1948 when a retired photographer living on a neighboring yacht gave me a set of professional objective lenses that fit the screw threads on a toy microscope I had. I soon kludged the rest of the mechanics and optics required to give me a university quality microscope that allowed me to explore the diversity of microscopic life from which most of the animal and plant phyla - and their embryos - evolved. Teaching invertebrate biology at Southern Illinois University Edwardsville provided me with access to a high-powered, long-focus medical microscope, which afforded ample opportunities to study the unfettered activities of various phyla of microbiota through the side of marine and freshwater aquaria.)
• marine and aerospace engineering and production (from 1945 - when my father began restoring our family yacht and rebuilding two surplus landings into highly capable albacore trollers amongst the WWII shipyards, and later worked as a boat handler for Howard Hughes's "Spruce Goose", for several decades the largest heavier than air craft ever flown. From around 1962, when we moved to San Diego, he worked as an industrial and logistic support engineer for Ryan Aeronautical and then overhaul & repair of the Pacific Naval Air Arm at North Island Air Station just across the channel from where we were moored. And then San Diego was also the home of General Dynamics' development and production of Atlas rockets that launched the Moon landers.)
Beginning with my tertiary education in 1957, my areas of expertise began expanding exponentially. These will only be listed - again, more or less in the order they were acquired.
• All generations of computer technologies: cybernetics, analysis, design, flow charting, and programming.
• Cognitive science: neurophysiology, sensory & developmental physiology research, primate cognition, origins of consciousness & languages, artificial intelligence.
• General biology & natural history: origin of life & exobiology, population biology, biogeography, niche construction, and systematics & classification.
• Radiation and systems ecology: engineering & remote sensing analyses of nuclear accidents (e.g., Fukushima Daiichi, Chernobyl, 3-Mile Island, etc.), biological and civilian impacts of environmental radiation, radiological tracing, isotopic dating, trophic ecology, and food webs.
• Other ecology: e.g., wildfire origins & succession.
• Biochemistry and structural biology: molecular biology, cell biology & ultrastructure, histology, and functional & comparative anatomy.
• Genetic systems: molecular genetics, cytogenetics, classical genetics, comparative genetics, population genetics, speciation & evolution.
• Earth sciences: plate tektonics, geomorphology, stratigraphy, climatology, glaciology, physical oceanography, hydrology, natural sources of greenhouse gases and their feedback contributions to global warming.
• Historical studies: history of philosophy of science and technology, nature and structure of scientific revolutions after Thomas Kuhn, nature of wars (focus on WWII), biography of leadership, social change, economic structure, comparative religion, archeology, hominin evolution, emergence of language and self-consciousness, coevolution of cognition and technologies.
• Theory of heirarchically complex living systems: emergence of autopoiesis at several levels of organization, organizational epistemology, OODA cycles, and management of organizational knowledge.
• Complexity, assembly theory, chaos, complex systems analysis. Engineering: Failure modes effects and criticality analysis (FMECA), logistics support engineering and analysis, integrated project lifecycle data & documentation management, engineering change management, etc. Biology: emergence, phylogenesis, thresholds, collapse, extinction. Evolutionary cosmology.
• Philosophy & epistemology: evolutionary epistemology, normal science, truth, verification, falsification, fallibility, objective vs subjective knowledge, Kuhn's paradigms & scientific revolutions, radical constructivism, reductionism, comparative approach, fake news & alternative facts, prediction, anticipation, forecasting, modeling, Popper's three worlds of knowledge, teleology & teleonomy, Aristotle's four causes, Ockham's razor, philosophy of mind.
As soon as I have the time, I will share some of my relevant writings and make several suggestions as to where your theory can be strengthened and extended. There is very little I would disagree with in terms of your theoretical proposals or interpretation of evidence.
William Hall, PhD
Retired: evolutionary biologist / epistemologist / complex systems analyst & designer / earth systems scientist
Evolutionary Biology of Species and Organizations (https://web.archive.org/web/20230328025721/https://orgs-evolution-knowledge.net/)
Hon. Editor VoteClimateOne.orgs.au's Climate Sentinel News
What an absolutely fascinating life you have led. Thank you for sharing it with me.
I am delighted that you largely agree with my proposals. Yes, please do indeed suggest improvements and extensions to the theory. Much appreciated.
Fondest regards,
-Julian
Stellar work! You've not only made a daring rush at the truth, unsupported by conventional credentials, but given us all a great deal of fun in the process. You might be right, too, of course, and justly win universal praise.
As you continue to explore the rich theme of the Eggiverse, give a thought to the possibility that the universe has been (super-)naturally selected to reproduce with the help of human agency. Reëcreational Theology embraces that hypothesis and from it makes an argument for having s*x (like biological sex but moreso) with the universe; see: https://t0morrow.substack.com/
Congratulations; you're well on your way to sainthood in the first real science of theology.
Thank you, I think! If evolutionary cosmology gains traction, I do think there will be an extraordinarily fertile conversation between science and religion. The boundaries will get very blurred. (And I suspect there will be a great deal of resistance to that, from both the science and religion sides.)
The idea of early black hole formation driving later star and galaxy formation a great idea, but I can't think of any reason you need to bring in evolution. If you haul in evolution, you have to come up with a mechanism that preserves some of the laws of physics across the creation of a new one while allowing others to vary. Darwin could at least start out with the empirical fact of heredity. New organisms largely resemble their parent organisms. We have nothing like this with regard to universe formation.
This is especially problematic since the whole evolutionary idea is unnecessary. Why not just invoke the anthropic principle? Here we are debating this. That's an empirical fact. Why haul in so much extraneous complexity. Why deal with annoyed evolutionary biologists who have their own philosophical concerns? There's an awful lot of teleology here. We don't know how new universes are formed, and almost by definition we can't know much about them.
It makes much more sense to develop a theory that explains our universe without bonus mysticism, and it looks like you have a good one here. I don't see how it benefits from introducing failed universes and the possibility of super-universes and the like. It offers a good framework for addressing the early galaxy problem, the voids and filaments problem and, for all I know, the rotation curve problem.
P.S. In N-body research, there's a common pattern of increasingly tightly coupled subsystems with their angular momentum dissipated by overall system expansion. This fits very well with that. Complexity develops from the basic mathematics of gravitational attraction in an expanding universe. I took most of The Janus Point with a grain of salt, but I suspect the discussion of the N-body problem is at least aligned.
I really like the cosmological part, seems like a neat solution to many important problems. Nice work!
But I am not convinced at all by the evolutionary part:
1. I don't think it can be tested unless we can observe our child-universes or parent-universe, which we cannot, by definition.
2. To have evolution we need reproduction, which we have here, but also some competition for resources. Do universes compete for something among themselves? In an evolutionary theory I would like to see a conclusion that in the long run there are no universes not optimized for survival. Without that we can only say that our universe is more probable than a universe which cannot harbor us, but that's not super interesting.
3. It is unecessary to make cosmological part work. I suppose they fit nicely together, but if cosmological part explains observations and gives correct predictions it does so regardless of a reason for our universe's starting conditions.
"1. I don't think it can be tested unless we can observe our child-universes or parent-universe, which we cannot, by definition."
I am a hobbyist at best and I'm sure I haven't grasped everything fully, so please indulge me. I agree with your statement, yet perhaps we could see galaxies from relatives-universes.
Could galaxies from neighboring universes expand toward us, be observable and perhaps even collide with a galaxy of ours? Could the origin of such galaxies be detected as different?
Without presuming another dimension, I'd guess that the multiverse resembles a clump of multiplying cells butting up against each other.
I dunno...
2. That’s what I was thinking. If the reproductive cost is zero, per the article, and given that time is an in-universe constraint rather than existing outside of it, then there is no selection for or against different levels of black hole optimization. They should all produce equal amounts over ‘time’, if my logic is on track here.
Moreover, if our own universe is the spawn of a black hole that presumably was produced by a technological civilization to use for energy, wouldn’t we see the effects somewhere of extra mass from outside the universe being fed into ours to use for energy on their side?
And as someone else pointed out above, if black holes can disappear over time from emitting hawking radiation, what are the in-universe implications for this?
At any rate, this article is very interesting and I love his critiques of the mainstream theory and reasons behind it. Personally, I think that reality tends to be more interesting than whatever story we come up with to draw meaning from it, which is why his theory seems (to me anyway) to lose momentum when he gets into the cosmological and more speculative section.
Cool theory, love it. Unlikely as it appears, it would be really funny if a major branch of physics ended up disrupted by a complete outsider's theory formulated in qualitative (non-math) language.
I remember reading that S. Hawking more or less proved that black holes radiate energy, so that smaller ones can end up vanishing entirely. How does that fit with your theory, or Smolin's? If the creation of a black hole also creates a universe, what happens to that universe when the black hole vanishes?
I might be missing the mechanisms of heredity within this evolutionary paradigm. If a universe's 'fitness' is simply determined by the propensity for black holes to form within it, i.e:
1. Black holes spawn universes
2. Universes well-suited for black holes production greatly outnumber those where black holes are scarce
3. Technological societies provide an immense evolutionary advantage in this context, as technological progress converges towards the creation of artificial black holes (which greatly outnumber naturally-formed ones)
how then would universes inherit from the context of their spawning black hole? What might be the analogue to recombination or mosaicism yielding subtle incremental differences subject to selective pressure?
Got any comment on the JADES findings?
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-025-08779-5
Lots of quotes from surprised astronomers declaring it should be impossible:
https://science.nasa.gov/missions/webb/nasas-webb-sees-galaxy-mysteriously-clearing-fog-of-early-universe/
Excellent stuff Julian! It’s exciting to see all your thoughts and insights so fully laid out. And good riddance to dark matter :)
I do think this is the foundational truth of our type of universe. I think for anyone for whom the Nick Bostrum argument strikes a chord (in the supposition that if a certain type of universe mathematically dominates/outnumbers another, that’s the one we are likely to experience), that cosmological natural selection should be orders of magnitude more impactful and more innate.
I’m extremely impressed with the blowtorch concept and the testable predictions you make (something that seems to be too foreboding to those squarely in academia doing research), and I’m excited to see them bear out.
The two things I’d personally think about/would love to hear your arguments about:
1. why black hole drives/reactors over matter-antimatter annihilation drives (I guess: is it truly theoretically maximally efficient to use black holes over whatever loss would be evolved in the precursor or capture steps to matter-antimatter annihilation). Is there something there about the lack of antimatter in the early universe that the theory also illuminates? Perhaps that antimatter was never created, or just the more obvious statement that such a universe with lots of initial annihilation would not have reproduced/made black holes well so we don’t find ourselves in one. [Perhaps this should be an additional postulate you volunteer: matter-anti-matter annihilation as a power generator will never be as efficient as black holes well drives.?]
2. We spoke about this at some point, but how does the local vs global maxima come into play from a cardinality/degree of infinity and reproduction standpoint.
Also from a SETI mindset, are there any technosignatures of Everest size black hole drives we could hope to see? I understand you are trying to straddle the line between mainstream (ie non “woo woo”) enough to be considered by “serious” scientific minds, but an obvious unstated (or maybe merely hinted at) part of the 3rd wave of black holes is ubiquitous intelligence. Maybe that can be saved for when you’ve hit the mainstream :)
Amazing stuff and I will be sure to share! I think Event Horizon with John Michael Godier would be an excellent place to be interviewed. Event horizons: https://youtube.com/@eventhorizonshow?si=X6Ow0eI7HX3UIkjA and his more short form channel: https://youtube.com/@johnmichaelgodier?si=3NR108ux0EMLtEGX are both very fascinating and he’s very open to new theories. His shorter form channel had a video uploaded yesterday regarding the evidence that our universe is inside a spinning black hole that is relevant, and he gets on serious people for event horizon. You’d make an excellent guest and he has had numerous videos touching on cosmological natural selection. I will comment on his latest video regarding this post and bringing you on.
Amazing stuff and can’t wait to keep following this. Here’s to hoping this borders on consensus in the next 15 years!
First, this is fantastic. I found Smolin's book three years ago, when Covid gave me time and motivation to think about why the universe exists. The concept forms its own gravitational well that sucks in those of us who share the instinct that dark matter is not delivering on its initial promise. I am grateful you are doing this project, and building a community of people crazy enough to take it seriously.
I want to get feedback on a related theory that shepherds the universe to the exact same fine-tuned constants as your and Smolin's evolution, but without going through trial and error phase. I would really like your reaction. (Yes, the theory is mine, and yes I also have no formal background to support the notion that I can generate a useful theory here. So it goes. I've been sitting on this for a while, without a community to test it on, so again, huge thanks for having the courage to start publishing on line here.)
The endpoint is trillions of technologically-produced black holes. And the mechanism is that while you are positing we get there by sampling potential futures in series (one at a time, through evolution), I think we get to the same place by sampling potential futures in parallel.
Here is how.
Rather than arrive at the end state of intelligent life through cycles of trial and error (black hole birth and universe creation), we can instead posit the following: (a) the physical constants of the universe could be something else (other than what we see, which are weirdly fined tuned for life); (b) those constants are actually variables at sufficiently high energy, like at the moment of the Big Bang; (c) the constants physically freeze into place as the universe cools; (d) this freezing is really an annealing process; and (e) the path that leads to the most rapid cooling is the one that gets frozen in. That's it. If you assume that, you find yourself on a path to intelligent life.
Why? One weird property of life is that it accelerates the creation of entropy. Life is good at finding pockets of energy, consuming that energy to create more life, and releasing low grade heat as a byproduct. Intelligent life is theoretically even more efficient at this than run-of-the-mill life. As you point out, black hole formation is the ultimate way of converting energy to entropy. So a theory that says "black hole formation is reproductive" and one that says "black hole formation is maximally energy dissipating, and the universe will go down the path that cools most quickly" end up in exactly the same place at the end.
The reason I like this theory, even after reading yours and Smolin's, is that the mechanism for fine-tuning isn't reliant on a random walk. It does require one large, uncomfortable leap: the annealing process has to be impacted by events that occur far in the future, after those constants have been fixed (e.g., the constants forming at/near the Big Bang has to somehow be influence by the ability to form life billions of years later). Smolin's theory allows the universe to sampling possible states through a random walk. This idea instead posits an anneal process that samples possible future universe through what is probably a uncollapsed quantum state that encompasses future times. If you think about it long enough, the anneal process requires some degree of retrocausality, which not exactly a great place to be. But also we have really had trouble figuring out how time actually works in physics, there are versions of retrocausality in quantum theory that are not entirely nuts, and, well, at some point we know that some laws of physics need to be rethought for the universe to make sense. I vote for this one, but understand that's a matter of taste.
I think that everything else you predict would hold for an annealed system vs an evolved one. Again, the only difference is evolution samples future states in series, while the anneal samples in parallel.
I would love comment, feedback, and conversation. Thanks again.
I wanted to specifically compliment you on how well you are able to distill an extremely esoteric and complicated set of theoretical/observational data into a well argued, coherent essay supporting your ideas. IMO not enough people understand how truly rare it is for someone to 1) even have the capacity to understand the frontiers of something such as cosmology and 2) understand this well enough to communicate it to a lay audience through a medium which is graspable. I'm a genetic counselor, so my work is analogously to translate evolution/mendelian risks to everyday people in such as a way that they can make informed decisions about things that affect their lives and that of their offspring. If you think the services of someone such as me might eventually be of use to you, let's chat more, or perhaps downstream...
One specific question if you get around to a reply: If I understood you, directly observing the EM radation from these large filaments in relation to the direct-collapse SMBHs is difficult to do because so much time has passed that these orientations in space have morphed over gajillions of years to make those relationships hard to appreciate. I'm wondering if that is also true of the large filaments that should have the North/South orientation to the SMBHs. eg. is it possible to predict, observe, and confirm if at the ends of these large filaments there are appropriately positioned SMBHs, or is this too Laplace's Demon-y to say "the angular tilty-ness of the SMBHs aligns with the direction of their massive quasar output and is what created the filament architecture we see today"?
I suggest you look into black hole electrons, an old hypothesis that fell out of favor mostly because nobody could figure out how to test it, because I think you may be grossly underestimating the number of black holes involved.
Because it seems to me that the theory predicts something else: Every particle that can be made out of a black hole, will be made out of a black hole.
Aaaaargh! Yes, black hole electrons are an alarming possibility. Thanks for reminding me, I won't sleep tonight now...
No, I don't go there, because as you say, it seems untestable right now. And of course there are also the disturbing parallels between protons and black holes...
https://scitechdaily.com/interior-of-protons-exhibit-maximum-quantum-entanglement-may-share-common-physics-with-black-holes/
But again, I'm not qualified to wade into such deep water. I will stick to my modest task of explaining material reality at the macro scale in terms of evolution of universes...
🤯